In August-September 1999 in Scotland, in the area of the mountain lake Loch Iver, strange events took place. First, two English tourists disappeared - Robert Price and James Morley. They spent the night at the Hogg tourist hotel, and the next morning they moved to the hunting lodge, located further on the banks of Loch Iver. They didn't come back on time. March Creek constable John McLeod went in search of.
Those who did not return
Here is what the English newspaper The Daily Mirror wrote about this (we will retell only the main thing). The constable found traces of two staying in a hunting lodge, and not far from the shore - an overturned boat in the water. Since it was obvious that an accident had occurred, the authorities launched an unsuccessful search for the bodies. The depth of Loch Iver in many places, even near the shores, exceeds half a kilometer.
It was cold, the tourists were dressed warmly. Plus rifles on straps, which they could not have had time to remove when the boat suddenly capsized, pouches with equipment, and then cartridges with lead bullets, lead shot. Whirlpools and strong underwater currents … They did not look for the missing, there was no point.
But two weeks later, two more disappeared there - the programmer of the Phoenix Ray company Barton Cooper, an inveterate hunter and climber, an enthusiast of the Scottish mountains, and his friend and guide Peter Wood. They had a satellite phone with them. Therefore, when people did not make themselves felt for too long and did not answer calls, they did not wait.
Since the only constable in the district, John MacLeod, was absent (he had been summoned to Glasgow the day before), six strong men with rich mountain experience came out in search of March Creek. The six also had a means of communication with them, both among themselves and with March Creek, and therefore with the rest of the world, which soon fell silent. Nobody came back … Except Charles Holby.
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Anxiety and fear program
According to the psychologist John McAlister, who worked in the police department (according to the owner of the Hogg hotel, recorded during interrogation), Charles Holby appeared on the doorstep at about midnight, more than a day after the release of the search party. His gaze wandered mournfully around, his hair became completely gray. He did not answer any questions, an expression of animal horror appeared on his face every now and then.
He would sit down, then jump up, pointing in fear at the windows and the locked door, then huddle into a corner, clasping his head in his hands. Charles Holby was taken to Glasgow, where he was admitted to the Saint Paul Psychiatric Hospital. There McAlister also talked to him … More precisely, he tried to talk. Holby, according to McAlister, did not just go crazy, his consciousness seemed to have been erased clean, like a tape recorder in a strong magnetic field.
“It looked like it,” McAlister said, “as if someone had stolen Holby's mind and put something like a resident program of anxiety and fear in its place.
Police flooded the area around March Creek. Every square meter was thoroughly combed. Nothing … First two, and then five more men (not counting the two tourists who disappeared first) disappeared without a trace. True, in the mountains he could get lost and even a whole detachment disappeared, but … The police would inevitably find him. However, HOW they searched, they would surely find every missing person, dead or alive.
Strange finds on the lake
However, it would be wrong to say that the police did not find anything at all. At the very beginning of the search raid, six guns were found in a hunting lodge, neatly stacked in a row on the floor. The shotguns were identified as belonging to six from March Creek. It turned out that these six reached the hunting lodge, left their weapons there and went on … To meet with what or whom they did not even have the opportunity to defend against?
In the stones near the shore, they found a leaf torn from a notebook. There were a few meaningless words written on it in unsteady handwriting, something like "Down here, deep down, you will be taken care of." None of the interviewed relatives and acquaintances of the missing had any idea what this might refer to. What is it about? About the intention to commit suicide in the lake?
No one recognized the handwriting either. A straight arrow has been drawn below. One might have guessed that this note left on the stone (probably pressed by another stone at first) served as a pointer. But the strong wind had done its job, and now it was impossible to establish where the arrow was pointing.
The third find was very strange. Found a flashlight in a plastic case with clear, deep teeth marks. Human - and what animal, having stumbled upon an obviously inedible object, will taste it? But a person who was possibly in the state of Charles Holby … One way or another, but all three finds were completely inexplicable.
The horror of the Hogg hotel
McAlister, accompanied by the police, made another unsuccessful foray into the disappeared area. Back at the Hogg, they found something monstrous. A man lay on his side in front of the entrance. You didn't need to have medical knowledge to know that he was dead. A carbine lay nearby. It was the innkeeper, George Hare.
McAlister picked up the phone and the police entered the hotel. There was a room with unpainted tables, one of which sat in the corner of Hare's sons. Both were dead. An expression of inescapable horror was frozen on their faces, the hand of one of the dead was lying on the table as if a second before his death he was trying to show the door. What was incomprehensible was that the bodies did not fall off the benches. They pressed their backs against the wall, as if moving away from WHAT was approaching them …
Incredible hypotheses
The police investigation established the suicide of these people using their Sigrid A-12 hunting carbines and the Sauer Sterling smooth-bore pump-action shotgun. But what was the reason? The most varied assumptions were made. The first is that the matter is in some natural phenomenon. Something like the “voice of the sea”, infrasound, from which people go crazy … Or it’s absolutely fantastic - that somewhere in the mountains a certain “machine of madness” is hidden, and experiments are being carried out. But the pathologists established the presence in the blood of the suicides of a small amount of a substance similar to a narcotic drug. For advice, they turned to London, to the laboratory of the Magnus Police Institute, which at that time was headed by Professor Gordon Aldridge.
Lightwing angel of death
“Within the framework of various programs for the study of LSD,” Aldridge said, “other narcotic drugs have also been used, in particular, a synthetic drug based on trimethylfentanyl, the so-called“light-winged angel”. What was presented to us for research is a previously unknown modification of the "angel". It is more than likely that the drug was sprayed in the area where people disappeared and died.
In the opinion of me and our employees, even micro doses of such a drug should cause clouding of consciousness, a feeling of horror and an irresistible urge to commit suicide. Here are the drowned and those who shot themselves in the hotel. Can anyone survive under such conditions? Yes, if you mean Charles Holby. We also found traces of the drug in his blood.
However, Holby is different from other people. The human brain has a region called the hippocampus. Physiologists cannot say with certainty what its functions are. One thing is clear: he somehow takes part in emotional reactions, in the assessment of probabilistic processes. But Holby's hippocampus is perhaps a little too well developed.
I don't know what triggered it, but cells in the periphery of his hippocampus began to divide rapidly. It looked like the formation of a malignant tumor, but, apparently, this is what saved Holby from the fatal effects of the modified "angel".
Perhaps the most important analytical areas of the brain were blocked. But I don’t know if we can say that Holby was “lucky” … However, when sprayed in the air, such a drug must be extremely unstable, so the action was most likely repeated several times. Lucky for those who came later …
Hannahan manuscript
Further investigation led nowhere. No bodies were found in the lake, nor those responsible for the alleged spraying of the drug, if any. But somehow the "angel" got into the blood of people! Who did it, how and why? It would seem that it's time to bury this secret … In English there is an expression buried a long with a name, which in our context means “buried and forgotten forever”, especially since Gordon Aldridge died on October 5, 2008 and no version can be discussed with him. … But the story got an unexpected continuation.
On January 9, 2011, someone who introduced himself as Patrick Hannahan came to the Glasgow Police Department and said he had facts about the Loch Iver nightmare case. He refused to give oral evidence, but left a manuscript, which allegedly contained important information. In it, Patrick reported that the tests of the means of influence were really carried out (by whom and for what purpose it was not specified), but the trimethylfentanyl derivative had nothing to do with it, it was sprayed in safe micro doses as part of a cover-up operation.
In fact, it was about psychotronic control (remember the hypothesis about the "machine of madness"?). In his manuscript, Hannahan even indicated the specific address of a person who can tell more about this. Naturally, the police immediately left at the indicated address.
However, it turned out that the person who lived there the day before committed suicide under mysterious circumstances. All attempts to find Patrick Hannahan and find out the sources of his information ended in vain. So the Loch Iver case is too early to be archived.
The truth is somewhere near…